D-day anniversary: Britain's good war

The allied invasion of occupied France which began on the Normandy beaches in the grey light of dawn 65 years ago today was not the turning point of world war two. That accolade belongs to the battlefield exploits of the Red Army, which also bore the brunt of the conflict for longer and killed four times as many German soldiers as the rest of the allies put together. Nevertheless, D-day was seen at the time, and has rightly been seen ever since, as a defining moment in the war and in shaping the postwar world. For this country, D-day has also become pivotal in the most potent of our modern national stories - the moment when the four-year threat of German invasion was finally turned away, when the liberation of western Europe could begin and when the possibility of the return to peacetime began to take shape.

All military commemorations inescapably evoke very mixed emotions of loss and sacrifice. Not even D-day is immune from that. The killing that took place in Normandy 65 summers ago was fully on a scale to rival anything that happened on the eastern front. The Germans suffered 240,000 casualties in Normandy in the three months following D-day. The allies lost nearly as many, the majority of them American. A further 20,000 French civilians were killed during the liberation of Normandy and an even larger number injured, many of them as a result of allied bombing. Large tracts of Normandy were devastated. Many children died from playing with ammunition abandoned by the two sides. It was a huge and terrifying battle.

Yet D-day has always meant more than merely a battle. It retains, even now, an immense inspirational power as the embodiment of a well-planned, bravely executed good war. Few people in this country, even now, would dispute the claims of D-day to be one of the finest military achievements of this nation and of the free peoples with whom we were allied. There were, as ever, blunders on D-day, as well as heroism. But the young men who fought their way up the beaches 65 years ago today saved the world as most of us know it. Their achievement has been much mythologised - but it was not a myth.

Those who were young then and are still alive today are very old now. Today, when the national leaders gather again in Normandy, it may be their last large rallying on the beaches and at the graves. Later generations often look at past wars with fresh eyes and doubtless this will happen to the Normandy campaign too - indeed in some ways it already has. Yet Normandy remains the prime example of a conflict that had to be fought and that was worth winning. That cannot be said for all wars either before or since - but it can be said of this one.